Here is Part 2 of the questions from last week’s posting on “Prequel Questions” on Developing New Asian American Leaders. Are you like me that sometimes it’s good to step back from a challenging task and, instead of listing facts or known ideas, to start again by asking questions. That’s what I hope that some of these questions will do for us with the task of raising new Asian American leaders.

These questions will help give a framework and start getting us thinking together about a minority privilege that many of us have access to, a faith that we want to share with more people but often find hard to be relevant, and ultimately wanting to provide hope and leadership for our generation.

I’d like to see your response to these questions. Ponder over them, write about them, wrestle with them, blog about them, pray about them, but don’t let it sit alone in your RSS Feed or on this screen.

These are the 2 questions for the week:

Is there a difference between the AsianAmerican movement and what is happening in AsianAmerican church leadership? Are they in line? Why or why not?

To be completely honest, I’m not entirely sure what is happening in Asian American church leadership. Asians have been in America for quite a few decades already an in that time, we have cemented ourselves into the leadership and economy of this nation. Eric Liu, past speech writer for Bill Clinton called us “the new Jews” as the unknown frontier of politics is now seeing more and more Asian leadership. My opinion of the Asian American church is that it once was a refuge for Asians who first immigrated to this country. But being a refuge is no longer necessary. Look at the population of the United States as a whole and you will find that the percentage of Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, Mexican, and East Indians has rapidly increased over the past decades. America is becoming a huge melting pot of cultures and its identity now corresponds to those ethnicities and religions. The Asian American church must embrace the change and seek to have open dialogue with those that not part of itself in order to learn and adapt. I personally do not want my family or children to grow up with people who have an “Asian-only” mentallity. In fact, I shy away from them. It’s only healthy to spend time with people from different walks of life and the church should be no different. If one of the functons of the Church is to help people find salvation, and the people who need this are part of the this cultural melting pot. How else can the Church truly determine what people’s needs are if we spend most of our time with people of the same ethnicity or even religion?